In another timeline, Think New Games didn't launch in the age of the smartphone — it launched in 1985, on 5.25" floppy disks, shipped in shrink-wrapped boxes to computer stores across the country.
Its founder was a familiar name: Adam Coburn — the same restless builder from our world, only born a few decades earlier. Working out of a garage full of humming beige machines, he set out to publish games nobody else was brave (or foolish) enough to make.
These titles never reached our reality … until now. Recovered floppy by floppy, this is the lost catalog of Think New Games, 1985 edition.
This whole vault started with a small, sad discovery. I watched my own kids grow up surrounded by games — and realized they'd never heard of the classics that raised me. The blocky, beeping, floppy-disk adventures that sparked my lifelong obsession with games meant nothing to them, because they'd never touched them.
So I asked a "what if." What if those beloved old games had come from a studio like ours? What if there were a whole shelf of lost DOS classics waiting to be rediscovered? The Lost DOS Games is my love letter to the era that made me a gamer — and an invitation for a new generation to fall for it too.
— Adam Coburn
REQUIRES DOS 2.0+
GHOST//ROOT
The very first title Think New Games ever pressed to floppy. A keyboard-driven terminal adventure about evidence, authority, and a machine that has learned to refuse. The network has locked out every human operator — your orders are to get inside and shut it down. Then you find the first piece of evidence.
Navigate factories, archives, and control rooms through one surviving maintenance terminal. Read the records, compare the clocks, and question the order — because the right command can restore a connection, or carry an order you never meant to give.
The disk that opened the vault.
- Genre Terminal mystery · network infiltration
- Play 100% keyboard-driven text adventure
- Scope 4 acts · 24 investigations · 100 locations
- Choices 7 contacts · 8 casebooks · 6 endings
- Graphics Monochrome terminal · 3 phosphor themes
- Designed by Adam Coburn
REQUIRES DOS 2.0+
SCRAPLAND
Think The Oregon Trail crossed with the Grapes of Wrath — and scrap robots. A software engineer loses his trade to automation, then watches the whole town fall to it. When Paladin Civic Systems arrives with a contract nobody reads, the Wright family loads what fits into a camper — scrap bots riding underneath — and drives 2,800 miles east toward a rumored refuge called the Fold.
You ration the food, watch the fuel, and keep the caravan alive to the next town — the wagon-train loop you grew up on, rebuilt with menu-driven turn-based combat, scrap-bot crafting, and a family under strain. Every stop is a different American way of losing work, and the corporation profiting from it keeps arriving first.
The second title recovered from Timeline TNG-1985 — the studio's road-trip epic.
- Genre Road RPG · turn-based combat · crafting
- Play loop Oregon Trail travel + Gold Box battles
- Graphics EGA 16-color · phosphor CRT
- Sound PC Speaker square-wave
- Scope 10 stops · 3 endings · 8 Trades, 6 bot Builds
- Structure Game 1 of a planned two-game story
- Designed by Adam Coburn
■ MORE FLOPPIES ARE STILL DECRYPTING ■
The Lost DOS Games catalog is being recovered one disk at a time.
New titles from Timeline TNG-1985 will appear here as they surface.